U.S. Appeals Court upholds $14 million judgment against Exxon

Yesterday 

HOUSTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans on Tuesday upheld a $14.25 million judgment against Exxon Mobil Corp for pollution from its Baytown, Texas, refining and petrochemical complex.


View of the Exxon Mobil refinery in Baytown, Texas

© Reuters/Jessica Rinaldi

The judgment stems from a U.S. Clean Air Act lawsuit brought by two environmental groups, Environment Texas and the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter.

This is Exxon’s second appeal of a Houston U.S. district court’s ruling that Exxon was responsible for repeated releases of pollution from the refinery and chemical plants in Baytown.

Exxon stipulated the Baytown complex had 16,286 days of violations between October 2005 and September 2013, which included multiple simultaneous violations.

“While we respect the court’s opinion, we disagree with the decision,” said Exxon spokeswoman Julie King. “We have acted responsibly and in accordance with regulatory requirements. We are reviewing the decision and considering next steps.”

Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas, called on Exxon to accept the repeated decisions in the case against the company.

“After 13 years of litigation – including a three-week trial, two appeals, two remands of the case to the trial court for additional findings, and three appellate decisions against them – it is long past time for Exxon to accept responsibility and finally pay what it owes to the public for years of illegal, toxic pollution,” Metzger said.

The case was brought by the two groups under a provision of the Clean Air Act that allows citizens to sue when government agencies have failed to prevent pollution.

(Reporting by Erwin Seba; editing by Richard Pullin)

Snap to lay off more than a thousand employees
MobileSyrup - Yesterday 

Snap to lay off more than a thousand employees© Provided by MobileSyrup

Snap will lay off a fifth of its workforce starting today, according to The Verge.

The publication states the company has been planning the layoffs for weeks.

Sources familiar with the matter state some departments will be impacted greater than others. This includes the team responsible for the social mapping app Zenly, as well as their hardware division, responsible for the Pixy camera drone. The product, which was revealed in April, has been cancelled.

Related video: Snap Planning to Cut 20% of Workforce Starting Wednesday
Duration 2:02  View on Watch

The Verge says the layoffs shouldn’t be a surprise, as the company’s stock prices have sunk 80 percent since the year began. The company hired aggressively during the pandemic, growing its workforce to over 6,400 employees.

Snap isn’t the only tech company to recently let go of employees or slow its hiring. Shopify and Tesla, to name a few, have also gone this route.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Source: The Verge

Many Philadelphia schools forced to close early due to lack of air conditioning

CBS News - Yesterday 


More than 100 schools in Philadelphia will dismiss early on Wednesday due to a lack of functioning air conditioning in the hot weather. The schools will let out three hours earlier than the normal dismissal time, CBS Philidelphia reports.

Some parents told CBS News' Elise Preston that the uncomfortable conditions are nothing new for their children.

"[My son] Juelz had to go to the nurse's office to get relief from the heat because that was the only place they had air conditioning," parent Sherice Workman said.

Workman advocated to get air conditioning put in over the summer, and as a result her son's school did not have to close yesterday.

Public schools in Philadelphia face other problems aside from a lack of air conditioning. Some school buildings are old and inadequate.

In a district-wide assessment, Meredith Elementary School received an "unsatisfactory" rating after the assessment raised questions about students' access to working water fountains and safe stairways.

More than 100 schools in Philadelphia forced to close early amid sweltering conditions

Duration 3:53

View on Watch

"I don't understand why any school district would subject their students to unsafe, deplorable, oppressive conditions," Workman said.

A recent U.S. Government Accountability Office federal survey found that around 54% of U.S. school districts needed to update their infrastructure. The survey estimated that students in roughly 36,000 schools are saddled with outdated heating, ventilation, and AC systems.

American University Professor Claudia Persico said Philadelphia's shortcomings are part of a greater "national problem." Persico said these conditions could have long-term implications for a student's education.

"Heat impacts learning across the school year by potentially making it harder for kids to learn and focus. There's also evidence that if you take a test on a particularly hot day, you'll score much lower than if you take a test on a cooler day," said Persico.

Philadelphia School District officials tell CBS News that their average school building is more than 72 years old.

Officials said the district is in the process of installing air-conditioning units across the city and the entire process could take two years.

Heather Ganshorn, Medeana Moussa: Beware 'privatization creep' in education system

A well-funded public system is the right of every child, and the responsibility of us all. Privatization creep threatens public education.

Author of the article:Heather Ganshorn, Medeana Moussa
Publishing date:Sep 01, 2022 • 

The debate over public funding of private/independent schools in Saskatchewan has been reignited. 

Public funding of private schools has been on the radar in Saskatchewan recently in light of troubling allegations of abuse at Legacy Christian Academy, a school that receives significant public funds (more than $730,000 last year). While schools like Legacy currently receive 50 per cent of the per-student allocation of students in the public system, Saskatchewan has announced plans to create a new class of private schools that would be funded at 75 per cent of the public per-student allocation. In a recent interview with CBC, Education Minister Dustin Duncan said that Legacy would have met the criteria for this level of funding, though it will not be funded at this level pending an investigation.

This funding hike, which seems to have been implemented without public consultation, will put Saskatchewan well ahead of the rest of the country, where public funding for private schools ranges from zero in Ontario to 70 per cent in Alberta. Our organization, Support Our Students Alberta, advocates for an equitable and accessible public education system. We have seen years of “privatization creep” in Alberta education, and we are dismayed to see Saskatchewan pursuing a similar path.

Privatization is not about individuals paying for choices outside the public system, it’s about diverting public dollars to private, unaccountable entities. As this is generally unpopular, privatizers work hard to manufacture consent using other arguments.

Private schools prefer to call themselves “independent schools” (despite increasing dependence on public funds). Proponents suggest that public funding for meeting certain requirements balances a school’s independence with a reasonable level of oversight by government.

However, the Legacy case suggests that these rules are enforced minimally until a crisis draws scrutiny. It’s an impossible contradiction to have a school that is both “independent” and subject to government oversight. We should all question the use of public funds for unaccountable organizations that may place vulnerable children in a precarious situation.

Sask. taps administrators to oversee three schools after abuse allegations

Bank loans, farmland accepted as donations by Saskatoon church linked to Legacy Christian Academy

Privatizers frame education as a private good rather than a public one that benefits all of society. In this view, “parent choice” is the overriding value, rather than the right of all children to a quality education, or the broader societal interest in having an education system that prepares future citizens to participate in democracy.

Privatizers argue it’s only fair for parents to take “their” share of public funding to the provider of their choice. But this is not how publicly funded services work. If we don’t use the public library, we don’t get a subsidy to go buy books at Indigo instead. Nor do people without children receive any kind of tax break because they are not directly using the education system. Taxes are collected from everyone, to fund public services that serve everyone.

Privatizers suggest that private school families are somehow costing the public system less because their children receive less funding. However, funding individuals is not how education spending works. The per-student allocation is meant to be an estimate of how much an “average” child costs to educate. Some children require more resources than others, and that per-student funding is pooled to serve all students.

Private schools can select students with fewer special needs, from better-off families. When “funding follows the student” out of the public and into the private system, public schools risk being left with fewer students, but a greater concentration of high-needs students, and fewer dollars to support those needs. Schools also have fixed costs such as utilities and maintenance, which they must now cover with less funding, or make hard choices such as closing schools, increasing class sizes, or cutting support staff.

A well-funded public education system is the right of every child, and the responsibility of us all. Privatization creep threatens public education and is done largely without public discussion.

Heather Ganshorn is the research director and Medeana Moussa is the executive director for Support Our Students Alberta.

CANADA
Most doctors took financial hit in 1st year of COVID, but top earners did just fine

Valérie Ouellet, Katie Newman, Zach Dubinsky, Madeline McNair - CBC

Twenty-twenty was a brutal year for doctors. The COVID-19 pandemic struck, lockdowns forced the cancellation of scores of non-essential surgeries, hospitals faced a capacity crisis and health-care workers of all kinds endured threats of violence and even death.

For most physicians in Canada, the first full year of the pandemic also delivered a financial gut punch, according to a CBC News analysis of government health plan payments to 58,000 doctors in six provinces that make such data available.

A quarter of those doctors suffered a drop of at least 20 per cent in their billings compared with the year before, according to CBC's analysis. In a country where the average doctor makes $350,000 a year, that means that on average, one in four of those physicians was out around $70,000 in revenue.

"People need to remember right back at the beginning of the pandemic, things were really shut down hard," said Michael Green, a family physician and a professor and chair of the department of family medicine at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont.

In the early months of the pandemic, he noted, everyone was told to stay home, so few people saw their doctor in person. For about 60 per cent of physicians who get paid for each procedure or service they do — a payment system called "fee-for-service" — the lack of patients in the first few months of the pandemic meant a noticeable dent in their revenues for the year.

Ophthalmologists among most impacted in 1st pandemic year

But for a select group of highly paid doctors, it was a different story, CBC's analysis found.

Among the 100 doctors in each province who billed the most to their provincial health plan — a group that mostly comprises specialist physicians — only about seven per cent suffered the same 20 per cent drop in payments during the first year of the pandemic.

In fact, twice as many of these high-billing doctors had a 20 per cent increase in their fee-for-service revenues.

CBC's analysis also found a large number of them got federal money, too, in the form of the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy.

Woe for pediatricians, dermatologists

Plenty of governments publish "sunshine lists" of public-sector salaries, but provincial health-plan payments to physicians are a bit of a slippery fish. Only five provinces (B.C., Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador) routinely make the data public, while a sixth, Ontario, requires an access-to-information request.

The figures come with caveats: Generally only fee-for-service payments are included, which leaves out the many doctors paid by salary, hourly wage or by how many patients are enrolled in their family practice. And the payment numbers don't account for overhead, which typically ranges from 13 to 43 per cent of a doctor's billings.


Family doctor Michael Green said that at the start of the pandemic, patient visits to doctor offices dropped 'like a rock.' Later, some physicians were able to make back the resulting lost revenue — and then some.© CBC

The provincial payment data shows that COVID-19 lockdowns hit some specialties particularly hard. For instance, 45 per cent of ophthalmologists in Ontario lost at least a fifth of their billing revenue. The figure was nearly as high for pediatricians (42 per cent), dermatologists (40 per cent), ear-nose-and-throat specialists (39 per cent) and plastic surgeons (37 per cent).

Other specialists in Ontario fared relatively well. Only five per cent of endocrinologists saw their billings drop by a fifth, as well as nine per cent of hematologists and 11 per cent of vascular surgeons.

Green, the Queen's University professor and doctor, theorizes that some of these differences in how the pandemic affected doctors might be because once lockdowns ended, certain kinds of physicians had backlogs of work they could burn through, while others who tend to treat transient illnesses did not.

"Groups that would [be] able to, say, catch up on numbers of procedures later in the year — to make up for their backlog — would have a chance to get their billings back up overall for the whole year, even if they had a very low period during those initial months," he said.

Among them was Gdih Gdih, a Winnipeg ophthalmologist who was the fifth-highest-billing medical doctor in Manitoba last year, and one of the highest-billing doctors in all of Canada, according to the publicly available data gathered by CBC.

He said the first weeks of the pandemic were a trying time for his laser eye surgery clinic.

"When Covid hit, things went so slow and we literally had close to no income to pay 10 salaries… rent, insurance, equipment, lease, etc.," Gidh wrote in an email in response to questions from CBC News. He said his overhead costs normally run above $80,000 a month, or close to $1 million a year.

By the end of the year, though, business was booming for the ophthalmologist. On average, he had billed about $2.2 million a year in services from 2016-17 to 2019-20. But for the fiscal year from April 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021, his total billings climbed to $3 million.
Cardiologist's revenues jumped from $1.5M to $2M

Gdih said there are a "few reasons for the unexpected increase," including heightened demand for some of the higher-paying interventional procedures he performs; more work becoming available because of colleagues who decided to retire early or take stress leave; and extra time in his schedule to do that work since travel was mostly shut down.

Related video: Some of Canada’s highest-paid doctors benefitted from emergency COVID funds   Duration 3:10   View on Watch

The onset of COVID was Gdih's best year for billings since at least 2016, and he's not alone in that regard. An Ontario cardiologist billed the province $1.5 million for his services in the 2019 fiscal year, then upped his billings to more than $2 million during the first year of the pandemic. A urologist in B.C. who averaged $875,000 in revenues for the four years prior to the pandemic billed for $1.24 million in procedures in fiscal 2020.

Mohamed Awad was the 29th-highest-billing doctor in Ontario during the first year of the pandemic. The pain specialist's gross payments from the Ontario Health Insurance Plan jumped from $1.4 million to $2.35 million.

Awad told CBC News in an email that he, too, took on "numerous new patients whose primary physicians retired during the pandemic," and also boosted his work hours. By coincidence, he also opened another clinic in March 2020, just as the pandemic was getting under way, he said.

CBC reached out to a dozen other doctors who saw some of the highest spikes in billings during the first year of the pandemic. Two of them explained it was because they had only begun their medical practice partway through the previous year; another said it was because she was on leave before COVID, so her pre-pandemic billings were unusually low. None of those three doctors agreed to speak on the record.

The rest did not reply.

Overall, CBC News found at least 60 of the 600 highest-billing doctors had their best financial year in the 12-month period that began as COVID took over.

What's more, CBC discovered that some of them even took federal subsidies meant to help slumping businesses keep workers on their payrolls.
Federal subsidies for highest billers

Launched in March 2020, the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy was the federal government's single-largest COVID relief measure, providing up to $960 a week to employers per worker on their payroll so that they could keep paying staff instead of laying them off when business waned.

In the 600-strong group of top-billing doctors from each of six provinces, more than a quarter received CEWS money.

Winnipeg ophthalmologist Gdih resorted to the subsidy in the early months of COVID. He said the uncertainty of how the pandemic was going to affect "the future and the continuity of our business" prompted him to seek out the money.

"However, when we picked up later, I paid it back in full as soon as funds [were] available," Gdih said.

Awad also received some CEWS money. His accountant applied for it without his knowledge, he said, but he never accessed the funds and "promptly repaid" it once it became apparent his billings were surging and not plunging. He provided CBC with his CEWS account statement, which shows offsetting credits and refunds.

It's not known how much CEWS money the top-billing doctors received or for how long, because the federal government has only published the names of CEWS recipients. But there is no suggestion of any wrongdoing or that they didn't qualify under the terms of the subsidy, which only required that a business have a drop in revenue during certain four-week periods in order to receive federal funds.


Richard Leblanc, a professor of governance, law and ethics at York University in Toronto, said doctors who got CEWS should pay it back if they ultimately had a banner year financially.© CBC

In an odd quirk, CBC's analysis found that doctors who received CEWS payments during the first year of the pandemic billed more money to provincial health insurance, on average, than those who didn't get the subsidy.

Among the 600 top-billing doctors in the provincial data, the average physician who benefited from CEWS billed $1.7 million, while those who didn't get the federal cash billed their province roughly $1.25 million on average. It's unclear exactly why, but it could be that higher-billing doctors have more — and more specialized — staff who can handle financial matters like applying for a subsidy. Or they might have higher overhead and felt more pressure to shore up their finances when, in the early pandemic, the outlook for all businesses was bleak.
'Give the money back'

Though the doctors were all entitled to get the federal subsidy, York University law and ethics professor Richard Leblanc said it goes against the spirit of the government's COVID emergency relief measures.

"If you're a doctor and your revenue has been at a certain level and then during the pandemic it jumps 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, I think I saw a figure close to 90 per cent… That wasn't the intent of CEWS," Leblanc said.

"The spirit of CEWS is not a windfall. The spirit of CEWS is to make you whole."

He suggested that doctors who got the subsidy but, at the end of the year, showed a marked improvement in their bottom line during the pandemic should do like Gdih, the Winnipeg ophthalmologist.

"Do the right thing and give the money back. Because it's not their money. It's taxpayers' money."

CBC News asked the Department of Finance, which designed the $100.7-billion CEWS program, whether it was always intended that businesses could collect CEWS money early on in the pandemic and not have it clawed back if they ended the year with extra revenues.

The department said forcing employers to pay back CEWS for that reason wouldn't have been wise.

"Had additional conditions such as these been introduced to the program, together with anti-avoidance rules necessary to maintain the integrity of the conditions, they would have added considerable complexity to the rules and their administration," a Finance spokesperson wrote in an email.

"Such complexity and the accompanying uncertainty would have undermined the primary objective of the program, which was to support Canadian workers in a timely manner."
How did CBC News analyze doctor billings data?

To build a database of the highest-billing doctors in each province, CBC News compiled doctors' gross fee-for-service billing totals that five provinces publish every year, with information for Ontario obtained via an access-to-information request. The full names, specialty, years of practice and gender of the 100 doctors who billed the highest amount to their province's health insurance plan during fiscal year 2020-21 (April 1, 2020 - March 31, 2021) were compiled, as well as historical billings for fiscal years 2016-17 to 2019-20.

The full data sets of all doctor billings in each province were used to calculate the percentage change in all doctors' billings for fiscal years 2018, 2019 and 2020. Our analysis identified doctors in both data sets who had seen their billings increase or decrease by 20 per cent or more during fiscal years 2019-20 and 2020-21.

To find doctors who had received the Canadian Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS), CBC compared a Canada Revenue Agency list of CEWS beneficiaries dating back to Jan. 19, 2021, against the names of top-billing doctors as obtained from public records. When a corporate entity was composed of multiple doctors registered as partners, their names were separated and matched individually. Matches between the CEWS list and doctor names were confirmed through supplementary research, including professional licensing information, corporate registry searches, associated clinics and other documentation. The CRA's CEWS list does not specify the amount of each subsidy or how long it was provided.

In order to develop its methodology and better understand the data and any caveats, CBC consulted Dr. Michael Green of Queen's University and three other academics who have done research on fee-for-service physician billings.

Valérie Ouellet, Katie Newman (April-August 2022)

Madeline McNair, Zach Dubinsky, Mohammed Abdul-Hussain (April-August 2022)

Starbucks executives, directors are sued over diversity policies

By Jonathan Stempel - Yesterday - REUTERS

A Starbucks coffee shop is seen in downtown Los Angeles

© Reuters/LUCY NICHOLSON

(Reuters) - Starbucks Corp executives and directors have been sued by a conservative think tank that believes the coffee chain's efforts to promote diversity amount to racial discrimination.

In a complaint filed on Tuesday, the National Center for Public Policy Research objected to Starbucks' setting hiring goals for Blacks and other people of color, awarding contracts to "diverse" suppliers and advertisers, and tying executive pay to diversity.

The plaintiff, a Starbucks shareholder, said those policies require the company to make race-baced decisions that benefit minorities, and violate federal and state civil rights laws.

Thirty-five current and former Starbucks executives and directors, including interim Chief Executive Howard Schultz, are among the defendants.

The diversity push "benefits them personally to pose as virtuous advocates of 'Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity,' even as it harms the company and its owners," the complaint said.

Starbucks did not immediately respond on Wednesday to requests for comment.

The Seattle-based company had 34,948 stores worldwide as of July 3, including 17,050 in North America.

Many companies have been boosting their focus on diversity and training, including after the May 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

In October 2020, Starbucks said it would aim for Black people, indigenous people and other people of color to hold at least 30% of U.S. corporate jobs and 40% of U.S. retail and manufacturing jobs by 2025, and tie executive pay to its diversity efforts.

Then in January, Starbucks said it planned to nearly double its annual spending with diverse suppliers and vendors to $1.5 billion by 2030, and committed to allocating 15% of this year's ad budget to minority-owned and "targeted" media companies.

Tuesday's lawsuit was filed in a Washington state court in Spokane.

It seeks to void Starbucks' diversity policies, and have the defendants or their insurers pay damages to the company.

The case is National Center for Public Policy Research v Schultz et al, Spokane County Superior Court, No. 22-2-02945-32.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

Junior bankers are jumping ship from Goldman Sachs over complaints of late nights, paltry bonuses, and feeling 'unappreciated'

rhodkin@businessinsider.com (Reed Alexander,Dakin Campbell) - Yesterday 

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has made no bones of

 his desire to get staffers back to the office. 

Michael Kovac / Getty Image

There's unrest on the healthcare team at Goldman Sachs, where 11 junior bankers recently quit.

Six bankers left on the same day last week, Insider exclusively reported.

Bankers complained about long hours, intense demands, and disappointing bonuses.

At least 11 junior bankers at Goldman Sachs have quit in recent weeks, with six of them — all first-year analysts — handing in their resignations on the same day last week, according to a person close to the bank.

The analysts and associates were members of the ultra-elite Wall Street bank's healthcare investment-banking team, and represented about one sixth of the team's junior workforce in New York.

"It'll definitely be stressful to the group" to handle this chunk of bankers exiting at roughly the same time, said one current US employee at Goldman. Now, senior bankers on the team may be apt to take their feet "off the gas pedal" in seeking out new business opportunities, said a former associate who departed earlier this month.

That associate said a major factor for their departure was the payout of paltry bonuses by Wall Street standards. This person said that other associates had received year-end bonuses, which are paid to junior bankers in August, ranging between $25,000 to $75,000 — and that set off alarm bells. For comparison, the year prior, some top-performing associates earned $200,000 bonuses as a "thank you" for their efforts, the person said.

The current US employee, who has since spoken firsthand with some of the ex-analysts who left last week, said they were tired of feeling "unappreciated" by their bosses and routinely working until 5 a.m.

The person close to the bank disputed the notion that these 11 departures were an anomaly, saying that their timing reflects the spate of departures that can sometimes happen at Wall Street banks after juniors receive their bonuses in late summer. "There's always natural turnover around bonus season, and this small number of departures is par for the course," the person told Insider.

Goldman's healthcare team has advised on five announced M&A transactions over the past three months, including Amazon's blockbuster $4 billion takeover of primary-care provider One Medical. The bank's healthcare advisory practice is the second biggest fee earner on Wall Street following rival JPMorgan Chase, according to data from Dealogic.

For all the details on what's going on and what it could mean for the powerhouse healthcare banking team at Goldman, read Insider's full report here.

Rules need change to keep international students in Canada and fill labour gaps: RBC

OTTAWA — Researchers with RBC are calling for an urgent reset of Canada's immigration process to keep talented international students in the country to fill key labour shortages.



The path from becoming an international student to a permanent resident in Canada is not a straight line, lead researcher Ben Richardson and editor Yadullah Hussain said in a new paper for RBC Thought Leadership.

"Once they finish school, thousands of international students find themselves lost in this labyrinth that is the road to permanent residency," the authors explained.

The daunting task of navigating the complicated system may be turning qualified and much-needed workers away.

"Trouble in navigating a complex system adds to student stress and could deter many students from pursuing their Canadian dream," the researchers wrote.

According to a separate RBC Economics report, businesses posted almost 70 per cent more job openings in Canada as of June 2022, compared to pre-pandemic. But these firms were competing for 13 per cent fewer unemployed workers than were available in February 2020.

Richardson and Hussain argue health-care worker shortages in particular are a wake-up call for Canada to be more strategic in expanding and retaining its international student pool.

The pair laid out seven recommendations to hold on to Canadian-educated students from abroad while filling jobs in key industries like STEM, health care and green trades.

One of the issues, they said, is that study permit holders are limited to only 20 hours of off-campus work per week to protect the immigration system from potential abuse.

Given the tight labour markets, the researchers argue there is a case to allow international students to accumulate more Canadian work experience in their field of study.

They say a lack of work experience is a key barrier to students finding a job after they graduate, which also puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to getting permanent residency.

They also suggest the government should provide guidance on targeted work-study programs that more closely align with the skills needed by provincial governments and employers.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 1, 2022.

Laura Osman, The Canadian Press

Defence lawyers to stage walkout in Edmonton and Calgary Friday over legal aid funding

CBC/Radio-Canada - Yesterday 

Alberta defence lawyers will stage a 90-minute courthouse walkout in Edmonton and Calgary on Friday morning, to protest the lack of progress in their fight with the provincial government for increased legal aid funding.


Defence lawyers will stay out of the courtroom in Calgary 

and Edmonton on Friday morning for 90 minutes.© Cort Sloan/CBC

The planned walkout will take place between 9 and 10:30 a.m. The demonstration is the latest salvo in the ongoing battle between lawyers and Justice Minister Tyler Shandro and the provincial government over legal aid funding.

"Across the province, defence lawyers have decided that enough is enough," the lawyers stated in a joint news release issued Wednesday afternoon by the Calgary, Edmonton, Red Deer and southern Alberta defence lawyers associations.

"The government's funding commitment arrears now sit at $80 million."

Legal Aid Alberta (LAA) is a non-profit organization that provides legal services to Albertans in family, domestic violence, child welfare, immigration and criminal defence cases.

Joseph Dow, Shandro's press secretary, said earlier this month that Alberta offers more legal aid services than other jurisdictions and that since 2015, the government has increased funding to LAA by 47 per cent.

According to figures from LAA's annual reports, provincial government funding did increase by 47 per cent between the 2015-16 fiscal year and 2018-19, but decreased for the next two years.

"We're not here to play politics, which Shandro is," Criminal Trial Lawyers Association president Danielle Boisvert told CBC News.

"I would tell him 'stop playing politics and get the job done. You're in a position of power. Make it happen'."

Boisvert said no meetings or negotiations are currently scheduled with justice department officials or the justice minister.

"The level of frustration is increasing insofar as the lack of response from the government," Boisvert said. "That really actually only strengthens our resolve."

Beginning Thursday, the defence lawyers will stop accepting new legal aid cases for the most serious criminal charges, including sex assaults and homicides.

"With defence lawyers no longer willing to prop up a broken system, our courts will be swamped with more and more self-represented persons," states the joint news release from the four associations.

"Matters will take longer, backlogs will mount, access to justice will decline and overall system costs will increase."

Alberta extends deadline for Athabasca U on deal to move staff into town

Alberta's advanced education minister has extended a deadline for a distance learning university to move more staff to the small town where it is headquartered.

Demetrios Nicolaides says he's granted a brief extension for Athabasca University to comply with his decree to move 500 staff to the town the institution is named for.

He has threatened to withhold the school's $3.4-million monthly grant if the school fails to comply.

Nicolaides did not specify a new deadline.

The university has resisted the demand, saying it will make it harder to recruit top talent and waste money, time and other resources.

Nicolaides says he believes that Athabasca University can excel while strengthening ties to the community and driving employment and economic growth the region.

Athabasca is Canada's largest online university, hosting 40,000 students linked up virtually across Canada and beyond with instructors.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 31, 2022.